The U.S. Department of Energy Makes Government Research Accessible Online (www.osti.gov)

Hi, I’m Lynn Davis. This is It -- a U.S. Department of Energy presentation on Making Government Research Accessible Online. I’m a DOE employee from our Office of Scientific and Technical Information (also known as OSTI) in Oak Ridge, TN.

OSTI is all about making DOE and science findings available and usable.

So, thanks for joining me! Note that this slide presentation is available online; the URL appears at the end.

OSTI is the Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information, whose mission is to advance science by making scientific and technical information (STI) broadly available.

To accomplish this, OSTI provides an array of web tools and capabilities designed to deliver science to desktops everywhere.

At the OSTI website, www.osti.gov, you’ll find access to everything I’ll show you today and more.

Why does OSTI have so much of It??

In 2007, OSTI celebrated its 60th anniversary. Since the time of the Manhattan Project, OSTI, located in Oak Ridge, TN, has been the repository for DOE scientific and technical information (STI). Years ago, as in many libraries, the information was available and distributed in paper and then in microfiche. Since the 1970s, our databases - full of citations for DOE STI, journal articles, conference proceedings and more - have continued to grow. In the late 1990s, our databases became searchable online. Along with today’s electronic information, we are striving to scan the almost 1M paper and microfiche documents available in our vault and making it available online as well.

In addition to DOE-sponsored science information, OSTI collects and makes searchable information of interest to DOE from other federal agencies and around the world. This has resulted in the availability of numerous databases.

To simplify searching our databases, Science Accelerator, powered by federated search, enables you to search up to10 important databases at OSTI -- using just one search box, and to get results in a single set.

E-print Network
• is a vast, integrated network of electronic scientific and technical information created by scientists and research engineers -- all fulltext searchable.

• is intended for use by other scientists, engineers, and students at advanced levels.

• is a gateway to over 30,000 websites and databases worldwide, containing over 5 million e-prints in basic and applied sciences, primarily in physics but also including subject areas such as chemistry, biology and life sciences, materials science, nuclear sciences and engineering, energy research, computer and information technologies, and other disciplines of interest to DOE.

• Discovered over eight of the elements on the Periodic Table [Seaborg]

• Developed the battery that powered the lunar lander module and other spacecraft [RTG]

• Invented the cyclotron (an early accelerator) [Lawrence]

• Provided evidence as to why dinosaurs are extinct [Alvarez]

For Science Accelerator then, the E-print Network and DOE R&D Accomplishments are a couple of sample databases you can search among 10. Find Science Accelerator on the OSTI home page at www.osti.gov. Use Science Accelerator to find resources especially focused on the physical sciences.

Science.gov, #2 of “The Big 3”, provides single-query searching of 200 million pages of U.S. government science information from 18 U.S. Government science organizations including Energy, NASA, EPA, NIH.

This is the front page of Science.gov. It is the USA.gov designated site for science. Rather than describe all that’s available from Science.gov, I’ll point out a few specific things. Note that in addition to the Science Education websites which you’ll see on another slide, see also on the left side of this screen, a couple of other education links under “Special Collections” –

Resources for Kids, Parents and Teachers includes searching of and links to sites like “Agriculture in the Classroom” from the Dept. of Agriculture and “Amphibians for Kids” from the U.S. Geological Survey.

ALSO… OSTI is working on a collection that targets DOE and other federal education materials online. Of great interest, is a capability we are working to add that will provide Grade Level Stratification.

If you’d like to be a Subject Matter Expert for this new science education resource, leave us your card this morning or come by our booth, #1240.

To give you an idea of search results from Science.gov, let’s look at the Featured Search which is often a topic of current interest. When you click the current Featured Search item -- here it’s “stem cell research” -- Science.gov runs that topic as a search query. Let’s look at the results …

At the left of your results page, under the heading Clusters, your results have been grouped into topics related to your search term. You can also choose to see your results by the year they were published.

On the right side of the results page, if Wikipedia contains an exact match for your term, it will be provided along with a link to the complete Wikipedia entry.

EurekAlert news items related to your search term will be provided under the Wikipedia result.

Science.gov, one of “The Big 3” federated search engines, is a great place to find U.S. government science information. These authoritative, selective sources are carefully chosen by member agencies of the Science.gov Alliance. The site, a true collaborative effort, maximizes efficiency by allowing users to access one site instead of many to find government science information.

In January 2007, the U.S. via DOE and the United Kingdom via the British Library signed a Statement of Intent recognizing a shared vision to search dispersed, electronic, cross-cutting science collections to provide direct and free searching of open source collections. Today, there are nearly 60 such collections from more than 50 countries.

In traditional search engines, such as Google, there is a large volume of documents housed in databases that is not available because of limitations in crawler technology. As shown in this image, popular search engines return results more from the surface web.

Federated searching resolves crawler limitations by making Deep Web documents searchable without having to visit each database individually.